The Foolproof, No-Nonsense, Kickstart Guide to Making Money Online is a step-by-step course that will build up over time. It is filled with practical advice, no-nonsense video demonstrations and working examples of how anyone, from a complete newbie to na advanced marketer can use the Internet to make money. Whether you make a few dollars of a full-time income is dependent on the work you are prepared to put in, and the level of understanding you have of basic principles.

This course is my attempt to give you those basic principles. I hope you enjoy and profit from it.

Part 1: First the myths. The Internet has changed the world is ways that are too numerous to mention. But there is one specific way that it can change your world out of all recognition.

Part 2: Before you do anything else. Everyone tells you that to succeed in Internet marketing you have to take action. You have to get out there and do stuff. That’s where so many people fail.

Part 3: It’s all in the name. This installment of the Foolproof, No-Nonsense, Kickstart Guide to Making Money Online is more of a show and tell than an article. Our subject is ‘How to buy a domain’ and rather than write a whole lot of words that won’t mean anything to many people, I’ve made a short video that shows me buying a domain that will ultimately be used as the online home of this course.

Part 4: Lies, damned lies and well-intentioned advice. Here is a quick extra part for you today, I want to end the week with a word of warning for beginners to Internet marketing and a reminder to those who have been at it for a while: Don’t believe everything that you hear.

Part 5: The Perfect Host. There is a glib, but often-repeated phrase that will be familiar to anyone who has any interest in Internet marketing: “All you need to get started is a domain name and some hosting.” Those of us who take these things for granted often make the basic mistake of forgetting that that phrase might as well be written in ancient Egyptian for all the sense it makes to many people.

Part 5a: More on Hosting. I’m going to start out today by answering two questions that have been asked by a few people regarding hosting and the various plans that Hostgator offers.

Part 6: DNS Settings. Making your domain and your hosting account work together. Having bought both a domain name and a hosting account, the next step of the process is to connect the two together.

Part 7: My Kingdom for a Blog. Today’s session is short and sweet. How to set up your first WordPress blog.

Part 8: Not even a pretty face. We left off the last session of this course having just created a WordPress blog. WordPress blogs, as you saw, are very easy to set up, but they suffer from a few disadvantages ‘out of the box’.  The primary one being that they are incredibly boring to look at! The default template is very dull - but the good news is that changing the look of a WordPress blog is really, really easy.

Part 9: WordPress Plugins - and pinging. The basic WordPress installation is great. It does all the things a basic blog should do - allows you to make posts and manage them quickly and efficiently. The developers, sensibly, decided that they would design WordPress with an open framework so that third-party developers could build small additional programs - called plugins - that would add all kinds of extra functions.

Part 10: On blogging and what to write. Today’s installment of the Foolproof, No-Nonsense, Kickstart Guide to Making Money Online is the last that is specifically aimed at newbies. Up to now I’ve been covering the basics of how to get a blog up and running - a skill that I believe every budding Internet marketer should master. Thankfully, as you will have seen, it is really quite easy. Armed with this knowledge, you can build as many websites as you like - there need be no more excuses!

Part 11: How to Create Your Own Information Product to Sell. In the last part of this course I hinted that one of the uses of your shiny new blog would be to promote your own ebooks or special reports. But is it really so easy to create a product of your own? The answer to that is a resounding ‘YES’!

Part 12: Monetization. Monetization is a big word (and one that I’m sure has only recently been made up) that describes and almost infinitely big subject. There are just so many ways to make money online that it is impossible for me to list them all here - even if I knew them all myself! But today I’ll try to outline some of the major methods of turning a few pages of text and code into money-making machines that will pump cash into your bank account day after day - even while you sleep!

Part 13: A Sense of Belonging. There are two words that anyone who teaches Internet marketing tends to over use (me included!): ’simply’ and ‘just’. Yes, both words apply when the person you are teaching has a little experience, but for someone who has never built a web page, never sold anything online and is totally new to this often arcane world of contra-intuitive processes and seemingly meaningless technobabble, ’simply’ ‘just’ doesn’t hack it.

Part 14:  Beware the Newbie Trap. In the old TV cop series, Hill Street Blues, the briefing sargent started each shift by telling everyone: “Let’s be careful out there.” I sometimes think that newbies to Internet marketing should have the same message flash up on their screens every day because it is so easy to fall for the hype and part with huge chunks of cash.

Part 15: Traffic - Form an Orderly Line. If you build a better mousetrap they won’t buy it. They won’t buy it unless they know where to buy it, that is. Websites are like that. You can build the best darned website on the Internet and it’ll just sit there looking pretty. Nobody will visit. There won’t be a virtual line out of your door. The hungry crowds will not be clamoring to get in. Why? Because they won’t know about it.

Part 16: Copywriting 101. We all live in a communication age. Never has it been more important to be able to put our points across in as compelling and persuasive a way as possible. Yet the idea of writing a sales letter, job application, report or internal memo can still fill us with dread. Where should we start? Where should we finish, and what should go in between?

Part 17: An Introduction to Private Label Articles. Private label articles are a huge buzz at the moment. And with good reason. In fact, the buzz surrounding private label articles, in particular has been around now for the last couple of years. And it is getting louder! Some people forecast that private label articles would quickly go out of fashion, but there is absolutely no sign that this is happening. If anything, they are getting more and more popular.

Part 18: Getting the maximum value from PLR articles In the previous installment of this course we looked at why private label material is such a good idea from both a money and time saving viewpoint. Today we’ll take a slightly deeper look at private label articles specifically to see some of the many ways they can be put to profitable use. A good word to use here is ‘repurposed’ - most people use plr articles in just one way, but here you’ll see that there are at least 18 alternatives.

Part 19: Reprint, Resale, and Private Label Rights Selling stuff that other people has made is a great way to make money online.  At its simplest, you just recommend the other person’s product to your readers or site visitors, they go to the vendor’s sales page and when they buy you get a commission. That is called affiliate marketing and is hugely popular. But what if you are not happy to ‘just’ get a commission? What if you’d rather get the whole sales price for yourself?

Part 20: A Long Look at Download Pages How to create a download (thank you) page. Some people get very worried about thieves stealing their ebooks. There are a lot of people online who are less than honest and think nothing of hacking their way into your site’s download page, ripping it off and distributing your hard work to all and sundry. Is this a real problem?

 Part 21: HTML for Beginners [#1] You certainly don’t need to know how to build websites by hand in order to make money online. There are all kinds of programs available that will build a website for you - from point-and-click general sitebuilding programs like Dreamweaver or Frontpage to the excellent XSitePro, which has been designed with Internet marketers in mind. There is even a very good open source program called Nvu, that I’m told works very well. All that HTML and CSS stuff is very much an optional extra. So why is it then, that so many people learn at least a smattering of HTML?
 

Part 22: HTML for Beginners [#2] We ended the last lesson having seen how headlines can be created with <h1>, <h2> (and so on) tags; how paragraphs can be kept apart with <p> tags; how the basic structure of an HTML page is built up from a <head> section and a <body> section, and how all of that can be made to look how we want it to by styling. That was quite a start, but it hopefully showed you that writing web pages isn’t complicated once you know a few tags and understand how they fit together. By the end of today’s lesson you should know how to build a simple sales page.

Part 23: The Why and How of Name Squeeze Pages For as long as I’ve been active in Internet marketing, and probably for a lot longer still, the mantra has been ‘The money’s in the list!’ In other words, if you can build a good email list, that is responsive to your recommendations, you should never starve. How you make your list responsive is beyond the scope of this lesson, (hint: be personal, be personable, be unique and be prompt), but one way of building your list in the first place is what this lesson is all about.

The Internet Marketing Lifestyle  One of the most often used phrases connected to Internet marketing is ‘the Internet marketing lifestyle’. It is something that many of my non-IM friends often ask me about. ‘Is it real?’, ‘Is it all hype?’, ‘Does it really exist?’ I thought that today I’d try to briefly dispel some of the myths that surround this mysterious state of being.

Part 24: Your Back End Looks Huge  Do you want to hear a secret? Something that high-priced gurus would charge you a fortune for? Okay, I’ll tell you, but only if you promise not to spread it around. This is how the big players make real money on the Internet.

Part 25: Online Experience for Offline Profits  I have a bee in my bonnet. I’m on a crusade and I don’t even own a cape. Everywhere I look there are businesses who have had websites built for them by flashy high-priced designers who are saying ‘We’ve got a website, but quite honestly, it doesn’t do much.’ What do they expect?

Copywriting for Free  Get a free copy of the excellent copywriting ‘bible’ by Ken Evoy and Joe Robson - Make Your Words Sell. 

Part 26: Sightseeing on the Road to Success  Why is it that human nature so often makes us take the most difficult route to where we want to get to? I’m thinking about business in general and Internet marketing specifically, but the more I think about it, the more it seems to apply across the board. For example, in Internet marketing, although there are literally hundreds of different ways to make money, most people struggle. But every once in a while someone comes along who succeeds effortlessly and makes a killing. How come?